Indo-European Sound Correspondences

The table on this page gives the main correspondences between the sounds of several Indo-European languages, as well as their reconstructed origin in Proto Indo-European (PIE). Where multiple symbols appear, hovering over them will show under what circumstances that correspondence is found. The first symbol stands for the development in all other cases. For the symbols used see the notes under the table.

These correspondences are not exhaustive, and represent rather an overview of the main developments - especially some particular groups of sounds (e.g. consonant clusters or changes conditioned by vowels in other syllables) may have special developments which have not been listed. The table also gives a good idea of the derivations produced on the Sound Change Transducers page, which generally uses rules in line with these correspondences. The table is chiefly based on R.S.P. Beekes' Comparative Indo-European Linguistics: An Introduction (John Benjamins, 1995).

If you're trying to find the proto-form of a word in one of the modern languages, check out this example...

Find the phonemes (i.e. distinctive sounds) that make up a word in the table (remember: sounds and spelling can be two different things - use the symbol legend below). For instance, Eng. fish has three phonemes: /f/;/i/;/š/.

Try to figure out what sources these phonemes could have:

English /f/ only appears on the row of PIE *p, and is said to appear initially.

/i/ has several possible sources: *e, *i, and *u. *e can be ruled out since a nasal doesn't follow.

/š/ can only come from *sk.

We now have two possible proto-forms: *pisk- and *pusk- (note that English generally drops old case endings). Now try to see what these forms would look like in another language:

German would have the same developments, thus Fisch - the word is at least West Germanic

Latin would preserve both pisk and pusk. We look in a Latin dictionary and find the word piscis which means "fish" (compare the star sign pisces, a Latin loan word, lit. "fishes").

To know if we have a *k or a *ḱ in the proto-form we need a language that distinguishes them (which Latin and English don't). We try to reconstruct a Sanskrit form: *pisḱ- would give picch-; we find this root in a Sanskrit dictionary in the word picchala- "slippery". Semantically the connection is reasonable - it seems that at least the root is Proto Indo-European and its protoform was *pisḱ.

You can use the Sound Change Transducers page to test various proto-forms and see what words they might produce in the different languages.

In general, it's important to remember that not all forms can be derived directly from a proto-form - some words were created late by analogy or loaned from other languages, in which case these correspondences will not hold